Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Backing Up 100 Gigs in an Hour?

Posted by Cliff on from the that's-a-lot-of-data dept.

cybrthng asks: "I am faced with finding a backup solution capable of archiving to tape about 200 gigs of a financials data in a 2 hour window. I originally looked into DLT8000 Jukeboxes with 2-4 drives but have recently discovered the new LTO drives. I am interested in knowing real world experiences with these drives as there has to be a catch. I mean there is a 3 fold performance increase in data transfers, two fold increase in tape capacity and a minimal price increase overall. With these drastic differences is there something I'm giving up with LTO over DLT or vice versa? Which backup applications are more geared to handling volume and integrate with Oracle RDBMS? Restoring speed is even more critical then backup speed so i'm curious about how these two drives compare and which applications are best geared for this much data on a nightly bases. Mind you there will also be about 500 gigs of data in an end-of-week backup as well."

5 of 79 comments (clear)

  1. Why... by Stone+Rhino · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Does the backup medium have to be tape? Hard drives are in fact more reliable than some tape, and would have a faster data transfer rate. A pair of hard drives hooked into a RAID array could backup over 200 GB of data and then be taken offsite just as easily as tape. Considering the fact that the drives would likely cost $400, tops, and could be reused many more times than tapes, I don't understand why people bother with tape anymore.

    --


    Remember, there were no nuclear weapons before women were allowed to vote.
    1. Re:Why... by duffbeer703 · · Score: 5, Funny

      Hard drives may be more reliable than tapes, but when the server room has water spewing from the AC and your controllers short out, guess what?

      Your "backups" are toast.

      Floods, tornadoes, fires, etc happen. Sometimes people fly planes into buildings. When that happens, tapes are the only thing that keeps your business in business.

      --
      Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
    2. Re:Why... by foobar104 · · Score: 5, Informative

      Floods, tornadoes, fires, etc happen. Sometimes people fly planes into buildings. When that happens, tapes are the only thing that keeps your business in business.

      I know this is completely off topic, but sometimes tape just isn't cost effective, particularly when you figure in the costs of manually storing and maintaining a library of data tapes in a vault somewhere. (Most of that cost is in head count: you have to pay somebody to do that work, and that's not a $19,000 a year job.)

      We're presently doing the cost analysis on a kind of radical idea. We're storing many terabytes of data in a data center in San Jose, California. The data center is as good as it can be, but there's still the danger (however unlikely) of earthquake or some other drastic event.

      Rather than trying to back everything up to data tape, we've gotten pricing from a telco on a dark fiber link between the San Jose data center and another data center somewhere in Colorado-- can't remember where. Since we're already putting an HDS 9960 in the San Jose data center, we can put an identical one in Colorado and use the 9960's internal "NanoCopy" software to keep them in sync.

      Believe it or not, it's working out to be more cost effective. One of the big reasons is that keeping that much tape on-line in a data center would require a StorageTek PowderHorn silo, and data center floor space is expensive. The difference in cost between the floor space and the dark fiber is so small that they cancel out.

      Like I said, I realize this is light-years away from what the poster was originally asking about, but it's kinda neat nonetheless.

  2. Easy - History. by tdyson · · Score: 5, Informative

    Backing to a stagging array and then moving to tape is a great idea. Backing up to HD means you only get to keep the last couple of back ups. The reason to use tape is to go way back in time. With a good grand father-father-son rotation, you can keep a lot of history with a reasonable amount of tapes. I have backups dating to my first week at this company several years ago. I can raise the dead from almost any 2 week checkpoint since then. I have had requests for e-mail that has been gone for 6 months and documents that have gone for more than 18 months. It makes you look really good to just smile a friendly smile when somebody asks sheepishly, "I need a file from an employee who quit last Easter. I'm not really sure what it was called, but I think I know where it was on the network. Can you help me?"

  3. A different take on the HD idea by sigemund · · Score: 5, Insightful

    By no means do I know a whole lot about backup technologies or any of that, but I do have a suggestion that kindof takes a different angle on the hard drive idea.

    I understand that you would want and need to keep the data off-site on tape (requirement). However, getting that transfer rate is going to be difficult. Perhaps you could do something like this:

    Use the hard drive backup (SCSI RAID perhaps?) idea to backup the data quickly and reliably. THEN, you've got it backed up in your time limit. Now, you can back up that back up with a tape, but you don't have the incredible time requirement. Get it?

    Concept:

    Original Data on Hard Drive
    --> Back it up onto a separate Hard Drive within the time limit
    --> Now, back up that hard drive that has just backed up the original. You have a backup done already, so you've met the time needed. Now, you can back it up with tape or whatever without having to do it within such a short amount of time. You can use the technology you desire to back up the hard drive copy while the original data drive keeps working.

    Then to restore, you can do it from whatever the removable media is.

    Again, I don't know a ton about this, but it's just a thought of another way to accomplish this.